Shopify Login Continuity In Flutter Webview

A seamless user experience is what we all look for. And webcastle has always been a promising solution for delivering such a seamless experience. We being the best digital transformation company have always been top in showcasing its potential to the world, how we prioritize in the best way to give as well as ensure our audience or customers receive a seamless user experience. 

 

Recently one of our software developers, Adarsh Vijayan encountered and found an issue with Shopify’s checkout authentication within the flutter-based webview. This problem disrupted the login continuity, leading us to investigate and further understand the issue thus resolving and finding a solution. 

Understanding the Issue with the expected behaviour and the actual behaviour 

 

Expected Behaviour:

 

When the user opens the checkout webview URL within the Flutter app, the Shopify API should pre-authenticate customer data, enabling a seamless checkout experience. This is managed via cartBuyerIdentityUpdate API which helps in the retaining of login session within the webview. 

 

Actual Behaviour: 

 

In this login continuity, users experienced the following disruptions:

Users appear logged in when the checkout URL is opened within the webview.  There is observed an inconsistency, Users appear logged in to the checkout URL for the first time when the user initially opens the checkout URL in the webview. 

However,  the user clicks or navigates back from the webview and relaunches it  or relaunches after changing shipping or cart data. They are unexpectedly logged out. This forces the users to log in again and negatively impacting the checkout flow. 

Key Findings 

With rigorous research through extensive debugging, we found a key pattern-

1. Users are logged in when they create a new cartID, add products and attempt checkout after invoking the cartBuyerIdentityUpdate API.
2. The checkout URL is loaded in the web view and this login continuity works only in the first session.
3.  While the process, if the user decides to exit the checkout screen and returns, the login state is lost.
4. The only process to restore the login continuity is to delete the cartID, create a new one and repeat the same process.
   

Solutions 

To improve login continuity in Shopify’s web view authentication, the following API advancements were suggested:

 1 Enabling buyer identity persistence across sessions for a better user experience.

 2 Allowing the cartBuyerIdentityUpdate API to auto-fill checkout fields, reducing manual input.

 3 Updating the customer token in the cartBuyerIdentity API to enable user authentication via the web view URL

In conclusion, authentication is a crucial part of user experience and the small inconsistencies can lead to significant disruptions. This issue was addressed and resolved proactively and WebCastle Media every time ensures its users experience a smooth, error-free login experience.